Online platforms have fundamentally reshaped power dynamics in the public sphere. Specifically, digital venues have significantly lowered the barriers to participating in public debates by enabling individuals to bypass traditional gatekeepers, such as editors in mainstream news media.
Instead, users can broadcast unedited political content on social media, blogs, websites and more – often anonymously and with minimal impact from the platforms’ typically lax content moderation policies. My research explores how this new form of inclusivity has created opportunities for groups that perceive themselves as politically marginalised by mainstream media platforms, but possess the resources and capacities to make their voices heard. These groups include antifeminist (or ‘anti-gender’) movements and far-right organisations.
Much of the online mobilisation of antifeminism and misogyny, including large-scale harassment campaigns against feminist and female targets like #gamergate, originate in the so-called manosphere. The manosphere is a loose network of online communities encompassing men’s rights activists (MRAs), fathers’ rights activists, incels, pick-up artists and MGOW (Men Going Their Own Way). While much research on the manosphere has focused on deconstructing its discourses, my interest lies in exploring how these groups’ structural privilege relates to their effective use of platform affordances to advance anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian politics.
Historically, antifeminist (and far-right) groups have been formed by privileged individuals who perceive their status and power to be threatened by feminist (and antiracist) struggles and political achievements. In my research, I have developed analytical and empirical strategies to examine how the actual resources available to contemporary antifeminist groups (relational affordances) interact with their strategic use of platform functions (functional affordances). This enables them to influence mainstream public discourses to become, in this case, less gender equal, as well as to engage in the direct harassment and intimidation of marginalised groups.
In one study, I apply these analytical tools to examine a Swedish antifeminist blogosphere that emerged in the mid-2000s. Sweden presents a particularly compelling case for studying online antifeminist mobilisation, as the country has long maintained a strong consensus around feminism and gender equality in its official public sphere. However, starting in the mid-2000s, Sweden experienced a significant backlash against feminism, which partly manifested in online hate campaigns against feminist authors, journalists and researchers. During this time, an antifeminist blogosphere took shape and became a central component of the Swedish manosphere. Leveraging their increasingly popular blogs to broadcast antifeminist claims to a Swedish audience, some bloggers soon gained frequent access to the opinion pages of Sweden’s largest newspapers. In doing so, they exerted significant influence over mainstream political discourse.
In line with contemporary antifeminist claims, the Swedish antifeminist bloggers expressed a strong sense of victimisation and marginalisation stemming from feminist gains and the perceived feminisation of Swedish society. As their primary solution, they argued that Swedish gender equality policy needed to be halted and reversed. However, an analysis of blog content and news reports reveals that these claims did not reflect actual marginalisation. Instead, many of these bloggers occupied positions of specific privilege. Most of the activists were (white) men employed in high-status, male-dominated and tech-savvy professions, particularly as engineers and programmers. One of the central bloggers was also a social media expert and professional opinion builder who had been employed as a government advisor on IT issues. While the bloggers acknowledged that expressing antifeminist opinions publicly in Sweden at that time could be stigmatising, they highlighted that the anonymity provided by (many) blog platforms greatly facilitated the promotion of such views. Thus, despite Sweden’s longstanding commitment to a strong gender-equality discourse, the combination of these bloggers’ specific resources and capacities, along with the affordances of blog platforms allowed them to gain traction for antifeminist claims in the Swedish official public sphere.
The study of the Swedish antifeminist blogosphere highlights the importance of further analysing how platform affordances can enable dominant groups to attack marginalised communities and undermine equality policies. Recent developments underline these concerns. For example, Meta, one the world’s largest tech companies and host of major online public venues, has announced plans to remove external fact-checking, relax moderation policies to permit dehumanizing attacks on marginalized groups – including immigrants, women and LGBTQ+ individuals – and end internal diversity programmes. Such changes are likely to intensify the current global backlash against gender equality, feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. This trend places an even greater responsibility on democratically elected governments to regulate platforms, and on researchers to monitor and analyse its implications for the democratic quality of public debates and democracy as a whole.
Malin Holm is a researcher and teacher in political science at the Department of Government, Uppsala University in Sweden. In particular, her research has focused on how the governance of platforms, as well as their affordances, shape power dynamics in political processes and practices.
The privilege of ‘aggrieved entitlement’: exploring the social bases of antifeminist political players mobilising online by Malin Holm is available to read in the European Journal of Politics and Gender on Bristol University Press Digital.